


till touch down brings me round again

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Background Reylo, F/M, Gen, Postpartum Depression, Rey Needs A Hug, Reylo Baby, background finnrose - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-22 11:34:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22915540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: Rey has been grappling with postpartum depression since the birth of her daughter.  For the first time in months, she's leaving her family behind for a weekend with her friends.
Relationships: BB-8 & Rey, Finn & Rey (Star Wars)
Comments: 72
Kudos: 253





	till touch down brings me round again

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for the Babies at the Border 2019 Anthology! Excited to finally be sharing it out. 
> 
> Thank you to jeeno2 & iodhadh for reading through this and giving me thoughts and feedback!

“It’s gonna be fine.”

“Call me if you need anything,” she tells him.

“I literally will not. You are having a fun weekend. If I can’t handle my own kid alone for a weekend, I’m a failure of a father and will handle it like a man.” 

She knows in her heart of hearts that it will be fine, that nothing terrible will happen, that at worst Ben will be extremely tired and a little overwhelmed but he’ll be okay, and Hope will be okay, and Rey—

She swallows. Hope is watching her with the biggest brown eyes—Ben’s eyes—bundled up in a little yellow jacket and a hat that Amilyn had knit for her while Rey had been pregnant. 

“I’ll be back,” she tells the baby. She’s four months now, and so very chubby and her smile is perfect.  _ Were you not a happy baby? Is that why they left you?  _ “I promise,” she says and presses a kiss to Hope’s forehead. Hope burbles at her and reaches a plump hand to grab at the fastening of Rey’s coat.

“It’s gonna be fine,” Ben repeats. He’s watching her closely. He’s been watching her closely the whole time, from the moment the test had come back positive to right now. Sometimes that makes it harder, but that’s Ben—never letting her accept the demons that plague her, even if it feels easier. And the past few months have been so hard. So fucking hard. “Have fun.”

“I will,” she says, even if she doesn’t believe it.

She takes the shoulder bag with her and flinches as the weight of it adds to the strap from her backpack. Then she presses her face into Hope’s hat one last time, and forces herself to turn around and walk towards the train.

Her feet feel leaden. Her heart lurches with every step, and when she descends onto the platform she knows that if she turns around she won’t even see a sign that they were ever there. She feels like she’s going to cry.

But that’s how it’s been for the past few months—feeling as though she’s going to cry.

She hates that she feels like she’s going to cry when she holds her daughter, hates that she feels like she’s going to cry when she doesn’t hold her daughter, hates that she feels like she’s not even a  _ person _ anymore, not even Rey who survived so much because she has this little thing that’s always clinging to her and crying for her and she hates that she feels that way too because she’d been the one to  _ want _ a baby. She’d been the one to ask Ben, to put them through a year of counseling while he warmed, slowly, to the idea of having a kid because he’d been so traumatized by being one himself.

She hates that everyone told her it would be perfect and it’s not.

And she hates that she’s leaving it behind for one weekend.

-

Finn sings a fake fanfare for her when he sees her approach. A moment later, his arms are around her. “Hey there, mama,” he says quietly as he squeezes her so tightly it almost hurts to breathe. 

“Hi,” she says, her voice a little thick because, of course, she feels like crying. How has it been three months since she’s seen Finn? She knows she and Ben moved out of the city, but before the baby, she’d still seen him frequently enough. He’d taken the forty-five minute train-ride, or she had, and they’d met up regularly. 

“How’s my niece?” he asks her pulling away. “You got photos?”

Rey pulls her phone out of her coat pocket and hands it to him. Finn thumbs in the passcode—he’s known it longer than Ben has—and a minute later he’s going through her photos. Gone are the days when he’d joke about not wanting to see any nudes, thank you very much. Rey can’t remember the last time she and Ben did anything remotely not-baby-related. 

That’s a lie. She can. 

It was before the baby was born, when her stomach had been big, but not too big, and Ben hadn’t been able to stop staring at her swollen tits. That had been a good night. They’d laughed, and Rey had only felt minor discomfort from the shape of the life growing inside her.

Finn makes the appropriate cooing noises at the photographs she’s taken of her daughter. “She’s getting big!” Finn says grinning and looking up at her.

“Yeah!” Rey says but the excitement in her voice sounds fake even to her own ears. Finn’s eyes flicker.

It’s easier to hide how close to tears she has been for months when texting with Finn, and it’s easier to text with a baby than it is to have the hour long phone-calls they’d used to have.  _ We’ll get back to it when stuff settles and she sleeps through the night,  _ Finn had promised her after the nineteenth time she’d apologized for flaking on him. He’d known it was hard. But he has the look of a man for whom it’s just dawning that it’s worse than he thought.

“You okay?” he asks her.

“Yes,” Rey lies, and Finn rolls his eyes.

“You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

Rey blinks, and her throat does that thing where it suddenly feels full of tears, and her eyes go bright and Finn’s arms are around her again. “Hey,” he coos. “Hey, hey hey.” And, oh fuck, she’s crying. She’s not supposed to be crying. She’s supposed to be having a good weekend. It’s supposed to be her, and Finn, and Rose, and BB, and Poe, and whoever else Finn and Rose had decided to invite because they were the kind of idiots who had a  _ dual _ bachelor/ette party and  _ hang _ societal conventions, they wanted to do it together.

_ Stop being a mom for a bit,  _ Ben had said nervously during their last counseling session when she’d been unable to stop crying.  _ Just—just be you. _

_ I don’t remember who I am anymore, Ben. _

He’d been alarmed at that. And that much more adamant that she go on this weekend that she’d been waffling about ever since she’d gotten the invite.

“I’m fine,” she says again, and she knows Finn will know that that means the opposite of fine this time. She knows because she remembers junior year, and being too drunk on gin, and code that comes from knowing someone for way too long.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Finn asks.

“All I do is talk about it,” she says. “Ben and I have been in counseling. And—no, it’s not like that,” she says at once as Finn’s eyes harden. His liking and trust of Ben is and always has been conditional, and she knows that the second Ben crosses any line, Finn’ll be at his throat faster than Rey can spit. “I’ve just been—” she swallows. “Ben was the one who made me come this weekend.”

Finn goes still and he’s looking at her as though if he stares hard enough, he’ll be able to see the universe in her skull. 

“It’s hormones, and sleep, and…” she swallows.

She knows there’s a word for it. She knows there is, but saying it to Ben, in counseling, hearing him talk about it on the phone to his mom—that’s different than saying it to Finn in the middle of Grand Central Station.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she hiccups. “I just want to be me. And I want to be here. With you. For your weekend.” She pulls the approximation of a smile onto her face.

“You don’t have to be brave for me,” he tells her.

“I have to be brave for myself. It’s all I have left right now.”

She can tell he’s trying not to look alarmed, worried, frightened. So he takes her hand and squeezes it, and says. “Okay. Bravery and no talking.” He doesn’t sound like he agrees. For once in her life, she half-expects him to text Ben, to send a  _ hey I’m worried about Rey, can we touch base?  _

But he doesn’t.

He just leads her down to the 4, 5, 6 and they stand on the platform.

“It’s a nice AirBnB,” Finn tells her. 

“Is everyone here?” she asks.

“Poe’s flight was a little delayed, but yeah—you’re the last one. Jannah came in early because she wanted to see a friend and Paige got here last night.”

Guilt floods her. “I’m sorry I haven’t been more—”

“Oh, stop it, Paige’s got it. You had an infant.”

Yeah. She’d had an infant. And had totally shirked her best woman duties. She was supposed to help with the bachelor/ette festivities, not let Paige do all the work. She’d become that person that everyone complains about when talking about group projects. She’d been so determined that having a baby would change nothing.

_ That’s not a realistic goal,  _ Leia had warned her.

But god, she’d hoped it wouldn’t mean shaking and being on the verge of tears in the New York City subway system, watching rats dodge the third rail as Finn tells her who’s on the guest list for the weekend.

“We wanted to keep it small,” he’s saying as Rey takes a deep breath. “You, Paige, Poe, Jannah, obviously. BB is here and so is Dio which is a fucking miracle because I thought for sure they’d pick their raid schedule over us.” Rey manages the fond eye roll she knows that Finn is going for. The sheer number of times that Dio had picked raids over literally any activity they proposed was so high that it was the norm. “Snap’s coming in just for the day tomorrow, and Klaud has work tonight, but should be around otherwise.”

“Tomorrow,” Rey says. Right. It hadn’t hit her until this very moment that there’s a tomorrow part of this event. Sunday seems so far away. 

_ I left her behind,  _ Rey thinks right as the 4 pulls up.  _ I just left her. I didn’t even look back to check and— _

She takes out her phone and texts Ben.

_ On the subway with Finn. _

_ Miss you both. _

He sees the message right away because he’s always been that asshole who leaves on his read receipts. It takes him another few minutes to reply.

_ Go be with your friends. _

_ She’s fed and safe and we’ll see you Sunday. _

_ I’m not replying to anything else unless it’s an emergency. _

_ What if I need you? _

He doesn’t reply. 

_ Can you send me a picture? _

He waits a full five minutes before sending a picture—not of Hope, but of himself, glaring at her, with the badly-drawn words  _ go be with your friends _ on it. 

It makes her smile.

She looks up and Finn’s watching her.

“I’m fine,” she says again, meaning the good way this time, but knowing that Finn won’t take it that way.

She turns her phone towards him so he can see the picture Ben had sent. “He’s on your side,” she says.

“I always knew I liked him,” Finn says.

“Liar.”

“You know me—number one Kylo—I mean— _ Ben _ fan,” he grins. “I’ve got a blanket with his face on it and everything. It keeps me warm on dark, cold nights.”

Rey rolls her eyes. “How does Rose like it?”

“It’s a big blanket—he’s a big guy, Ben—so she likes it. We fuck under it a lot.”

And Rey’s laughing—not a light snort, not even a medium chest laugh, something low and abdominal that rips through her so surprisingly that she almost has to stop and think about it.

She glances up at Finn. He’s standing over her—he’d given her the seat they’d found when they’d boarded—and she swallows.

“Thanks,” she whispers to him.

His face melts a little and it makes Rey want to cry but for once, the tears don’t feel like they’d be miserable. They feel like they’d be good.

-

“It’s a Rey!” chirps BB the second that Rey walks through the door of the AirBnB. “And Finn,” she adds as an afterthought. “But I’ve already said hi to you.”

“I’m less important. It’s only my bachelor party,” Finn says dryly, but BB’s arms are already wrapped around Rey. BB’s rounder than the last time Rey saw her. She has new glasses whose lenses have that slight tinting that comes from turning into sunglasses when exposed to bright light because BB  _ would _ get those. She’s already motormouthing.

“Okay, so—new job is terrible. They are all idiots and also it’s terrible for my anxiety because I think they’re constantly subconsciously telling me I shouldn’t have it but also they’re idiots and I’m smarter than them? But they hold the power? I hate it? But I got a new haircut to make me feel better.”

“It’s nice,” Rey says, reaching a hand up and running her fingers through BB’s new undercut. “What’s this?” She’d put in a dark streak, and knowing BB it would be code for something.

“It’s her antenna,” calls Dio from the couch, where they’re on their phone, probably chatting someone from their guild. “Hi Rey!”

“Hi Dio.”

“How are you?” BB demands at once, grabbing her hand and pulling her away from Finn as though Finn’s chopped liver. “How’s the kid? You’ve been holding out on us with pictures.”

“Yeah, I have,” Rey says.  _ Taking pictures of her is hard, I feel like I have to and then it takes the fun out of wanting to,  _ she had said in counseling and Ben had cut in at once saying he’d take picture duty if it helped. His mom was always nagging him for them, and he didn’t mind, it didn’t—

_ You can’t just make the postpartum depression go away by trying to do everything. _

_ Yeah, but if you feel like it’s making it impossible to get any joy out of life, I can try to carry the load, right? We’re a team. _

And then the counselor had cut in and asked Rey why she didn’t want Ben’s help and she just wanted to cry because she’s not supposed to be doing this anymore, not supposed to be a scavenger who assumes no one will help her, no one will love her, that it’s her versus the world. She’s married. She has a baby. She’s got friends. She’s part of a team.

“Rey?” BB asks, and she knows Finn’s watching her even though she can’t see his face.

“But I’ve got some for you,” and her phone is in BB’s hand again and there she is, cooing over her baby. Her baby she’d just left behind.

She takes a deep breath. She’s aching and her breasts are feeling a little swollen. She’d fed Hope before she’d gotten on the train, and it already feels like a million years ago even if it was only a few hours at this point. Hope hadn’t been super hungry because she’d eaten a lot that morning.

“I think I should pump before we get going with the festivities,” she says. “Where’s the—”

Finn points to the bathroom and Rey grabs her bag and closes herself in. She plugs the pump in and sits down on the toilet and takes a few deep breaths as she connects it to her breasts and lets it start to suck. It’s deeply unpleasant. She’d been pumping all week to prepare for this weekend, and she’d forgotten just how much she hates this thing. She takes a deep breath and tries to clear her mind out and feel nothing at all.

There’s a mirror right in front of the toilet.

Who the fuck puts a mirror right in front of the toilet?

She doesn’t want to stare at herself while she’s on the toilet, her breasts jammed into a pump.

She doesn’t want to think about her body at all right now.

It’s lumpy and flabby and her breasts don’t stay the same size for more than like two hours and she’d known that pregnancy was going to change her body but right now it’s just one more thing that’s not the way it should be. It’s not even that she’s fatter—it’s that it’s just not the same. It’s that she can’t remember who she was before all this, and her body isn’t even a reminder anymore. Her body has always been a reminder. 

_ This is who you are now,  _ she thinks as she stares at it. 

Even Finn had greeted her  _ hey mama.  _

_ I don’t know what it means to be a mom. Why did I think this was a good idea?  _ she wonders as she looks at herself, the way her stomach rolls as she sits.

She can practically hear Ben growling at her.  _ Your mom is not a good metric to judge your capacity to be a mother by. _

_ Yeah,  _ she argues with this figment of Ben in her mind.  _ But that doesn’t mean I have any idea what I’m doing. _

_ I just left her. _

_ Just like my mom. _

She takes a deep breath and reaches for her phone. She’s going to call Ben and cry. This was a bad idea. Except that her finger hovers over his contact information and she remembers the picture he’d sent her and the text too.  _ She’s fed and safe and we’ll see you Sunday. _

_ We’ll see you Sunday. _

She’s safe, and with her dad, and Rey’s not like her mother. It’s a weekend, not the rest of her life. Rey’s going to be there for her first day of school, for her first significant other, for all of her graduations and—if she’s anything like Ben—her first time getting picked up at the police station for getting into a bar fight.

She’ll be there for all of them.

_ Just a weekend,  _ she tells herself for the millionth time.  _ I can do this. _

She finishes pumping and dumps the milk down the sink. No one’s going to drink it, and there’s no point storing it to bring home on Sunday because she’ll be home on Sunday and can just feed Hope. 

Then she pauses.

_ I could drink this weekend. _

She hasn’t had a drink in about a year and a half. She’d stopped the second they’d gone off birth control, not wanting to be caught unawares. She doesn’t have to worry about how long it’ll take alcohol to be in her milk, and how much, she’ll just pump it out and throw it down the sink.

It’s fucking strange, how she seems to stand straighter, how she feels more alert at that idea. “I’m not an alcoholic,” she mutters to herself as she puts her pump away. She hasn’t had a drink in an age and a half. She doesn’t know what it says about herself that there feels like a fucking spring in her step literally two minutes after feeling so miserable she was prepared to call Ben crying.

Everyone’s laughing when she emerges from the bathroom. Paige and Rose have arrived and Paige chucks a t-shirt at her before she can even think and it lands right on her face. “We’re wearing this tomorrow. I hope it fits.” It’s a men’s large, which once Rey would have worn in a sort of cute  _ my boyfriend’s t-shirt  _ sort of way, tying the hemline in a knot so it would tighten a bit at her hips. Now it’s probably the right size for her and she’s grateful they’d shot large rather than small because she would have hated to have tried to squeeze herself into the smaller sizes she’d once fit into right now.

“Let’s Give Finn Something To Tico ‘Bout,” she reads aloud, grinning. “Nice.”

“Check out the back,” Paige says with a warm smile, and Rey feels a lump lodge in her throat when she sees  _ #finnroseiscanon  _ splashed across the back in smaller letters, the caption of the photograph she’d posted online when they’d first gotten together years ago.

“Nice,” she says again, and moves towards the kitchen where she finds exactly who she expects to find.

“Sorry ‘bout your flight,” she says, stretching her arms out to give Poe a hug.

“I’ll catch a flight, it’ll be faster than driving,” he says rolling his eyes. “But of course if I’d taken Amtrak, I’d have gotten stuck in bumfuck New Jersey or something.”

“Can confirm,” Rey says. “Beer?”

“In the fridge,” Poe says, gesturing with his own beer bottle. “You,” he says sharply, looking over Rey’s shoulder. “Out of the kitchen.”

“I’m not allowed to get a beer?” Finn asks and Rey knows he’d followed her into the room.

“You are, but also out of the kitchen.”

“I’ve got it,” Rey says, grabbing a second bottle and shepherding Finn out of the kitchen, pressing the bottle into his hand. 

He pops the cap, then pops hers, and clinks the bottlenecks together. “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” she says.

It’s tangy and bitter and perfect and she goes to sit on the couch next to Dio. “You winning?” she asks them as they type into their messaging app.

“We’re not playing now,” they reply. “But yes, we’re winning.”

“Good. Make us proud,” Rey says and she takes another sip of beer. “How’ve you been?” she asks Rose who is sitting on the other sofa.

“Wedding planning,” Rose shrugs. “You remember that.” She gives Rey a wink.

It feels like a lifetime ago, stressing about the number of guests, and hotel blocks, and photographers, and finding a cake that tasted just right because Ben was a snoot about cakes for some reason. “Yeah,” she says. “You’re keeping it small, right?”

“Yeah, thank fuck,” Rose replies with a relieved noise. “We still have a good forty people coming. I think Finn was right and we should have eloped.”

“Told you!” Finn says. He’s standing behind Rey. “I told you you didn’t want to plot this.”

“Weddings aren’t about you, they’re about those around you,” Rose says firmly. “And if my sister wants me to have a big wedding, then—”

“Oh, don’t put this on me,” Paige says firmly. “I’d have gotten my bachelorette party no matter what.  _ That’s _ what I care about. And on that note!” She stands up and the room falls quiet. “Poe, can you hear me?” she calls.

“Yeah,” Poe’s voice drifts in from the kitchen.

“Cool. Tonight’s freeform. Tomorrow, be prepared for a scavenger hunt and a secret activity and karaoke. Sunday’s chill and you all know when you’re leaving but we have to be out of here by five p.m.”

“That’s it?” Dio asks.

Paige raises her eyebrows.

“You want there to be more? Without even having seen the scavenger hunt I’ve put together?” There’s a bright glint in Paige’s eye that makes Dio go quiet. “Poe’s doing dinner tonight, we have dinner reserved before karaoke tomorrow, and we’ll figure the rest out.”

Paige sits down.

“Thanks, Paige,” Rey says loudly, and Paige winks at her. 

She sips on her beer and leans back into the couch. She feels very tired all of a sudden, and this is a comfortable couch. 

“How’ve you been?” Rose asks, getting up out of her chair and coming to sit on the sofa next to Rey. “Lot to get used to?”

Rey nods into her beer bottle. For one brief moment, it had felt like it used to, the people wrangling, the laughing, the beer. But one little question and she’s back to thinking about Hope and how she’d burbled up at Rey from where she’d been strapped to Ben’s chest at the Stamford Metro North station. 

“Yeah,” she says. She forces herself to smile though. “But she’s wonderful, so it’s worth it.” 

She doesn’t know what else to say. The words come out easily, but they’re hard because the last thing anyone ever wants to hear is that it makes you want to cry like a baby too, sometimes, especially when celebrating a bachelor/ette weekend.

“You getting enough time for yourself?” Rose asks her and Rey feels her eyes widen. 

“What’s that?” she laughs, but instead of a convivial rolling of the eyes, Rose’s face gets a bit somber. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says, wrapping her arm around Rey’s shoulder. Rey blinks, and drinks more of her beer. She’s definitely feeling a bit light-headed—it hadn’t taken long at all. “Make sure you’re getting time for yourself, okay?”

“I’ll add it to the list of things to do when I die,” Rey deadpans.

“You don’t get to die,” Finn says, coming over and sitting on the couch on Rey’s other side. “The rest of us, sure. But not you.”

“Excuse me, what about your lady love?” Rey asks.

“Yes, Finn. What about your lady love?” Rose asks, her eyes glinting with amusement.

“Well, if I die, someone’s gotta keep me company,” he says. “So we get to share an apartment in the afterlife. That’s what marriage is, right? Calling dibs in the afterlife?”

“Until death do us part, I believe is how the vows go,” Rose says. “Rey’s probably a better bet.”

“She is not,” BB says loudly. “I call dibs on Rey’s afterlife.”

“What about Poe?” and they’re off, spinning what their afterlife living situation is, compromising and hashing out terms and conditions as Rey sits there, quietly drinking her beer. This is just about as silly a conversation as she can imagine. But, god, she’s missed things like this, Finn and Rose taking opposite points on an argument just for the fun of the debate, BB demanding that her apartment only play Elton John music during parties.

“You’ve been lucky,” Finn tells Rey. “BB’s only been able to talk about Elton John since  _ Rocketman _ came out. You dodged a fucking bullet.”

“As if she didn’t take the train north to see it with me,” Rey snorts, winking at BB. BB had come up to see it with her in Connecticut because there was no way they weren't seeing the Elton John movie together, even if Rey's morning sickness had extended into her second trimester. BB had gotten off Metro North wearing purple star-shaped sunglasses and a blue, white, and pink flag tied around her neck like a cape. “The bitch is back!” she'd declared as she'd gotten into the car to go off to the midday showing, where the two of them had sung along to every song, knowing that they wouldn’t bother the others in the theater because they weren’t the only ones doing it.

“You saw it without us?” Finn asks, feigning horror and pressing a hand to his chest.

“As if I didn’t also see it with you,” BB said. “She was vomiting every day, I wasn’t going to let her miss it.”

“Your efforts were appreciated,” Rey says. “Especially because it absolved Ben from seeing it with me.”

“He doesn’t like Elton?” BB demands, her eyes narrowing.

“He doesn’t like biopics or musicals, so he wasn’t going to have a good time.”

“One,” BB says aggressively, “he’s wrong and you should divorce him. Two, he’s wrong and you should divorce him.” Then she turns to Rose. “You like musicals and biopics, right?”

“I saw  _ Rocketman  _ with you three times,” Rose says.

“Answer the question, Tico. Are you worthy of Finn?”

“And we’re only getting to this now?” Finn asks.

“If it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure that they were just relieved you found someone so obviously not Ben,” Rey says to him. She doesn’t know if it’s the buzz from the beer, or just the ridiculousness of the conversation or the fact that she’s smushed between two of her best friends, but her heart feels light, her throat feels relaxed, she almost feels like she could smile. 

Almost. 

It still doesn’t quite hit her eyes when her lips quirk up. She feels too tired or too drunk or too something she doesn’t want to think about for that. But there is laughter that’s jumping up out of her lungs and when Poe starts bringing food out of the kitchen, Rey feels as though she actually wants to eat.

-

Rey wakes the next morning before anyone else in the AirBnB. She’s sharing a bed with Dio and Dio has always slept like a log so she doesn’t worry about waking them as she sits up and flinches.

Her boobs are  _ so _ full. So so full. Which makes sense given that she hasn’t fed a baby or pumped since long before she’d gone to bed. But if she’s not careful, she’ll start leaking everywhere. She grabs the case for her pump and makes her way through to the bathroom, where she pees, pumps, and washes her face.

She’s contemplating a shower when someone knocks. “You okay in there?” It’s Poe.

“Yeah, just a sec,” she calls quietly.

“Okay—you were just taking a bit,” he says.

“Had to pump,” she says, scrambling a bit as she puts it back in the case. The shower can wait. She’s not super gross—the nice thing about winter is that she hasn’t sweat through everything. 

“Right,” he says at once, and she opens the door. He’s wearing an old  _ Resistance  _ t-shirt and his hair is mussed, his face covered in stubble.

“All yours,” she says, and he gives her a half-wincing smile.

“Too much last night?” she asks him.

“Not even,” he sighs. “I think it’s just dehydration. Dehydration’s been getting me a lot generally these days. Getting older is weird.” He slips past her and as Rey settles on the couch, she hears the shower running. It’s just past seven in the morning. She’d gone to bed earliest of all of them the night before, the stamina she’d long had failing her after her second bottle of beer. 

She checks her phone and—true to his word—Ben has made no contact. 

She clenches her jaw. She’d be feeding Hope right about now, trying not to think about how her heart isn’t full of joy at the idea of this baby hanging off her the way she is, trying not to feel guilty. She tucks her knees up to her chest. She misses her. Maybe not feeding her—though god knows feeding is better than pumping. But she misses holding her, the way she smells, the way she has Ben’s eyes, and bubbles of drool pool at the corner of her lips. Chubby and happy, both things Rey never was.

_ Why is it when I’m away from her, I miss her, but when I’m holding her in my arms, I feel— _

She pulls up pictures on her phone, ones that Ben had shared with her because he liked them, or thought she looked good in them. Even to her own eyes, she looks depressed as she holds her daughter. Her gaze is dull, her face is slack, her smile doesn’t spread past her lips.

“Want to team up on the scavenger hunt?” Poe asks her as he settles down on the chair across from her. “We’d make an unstoppable pair, don’t you think?”

“That seems almost unfair,” Rey says, smiling. The smile reaches just under her eyes, but she’s too tired to force it further. Hers and Poe’s combined knowledge of all things Finn would blow anyone out of the water, except for maybe Paige. “Am I even allowed to participate?”

“Why wouldn’t you be? You didn’t help make the thing, right?”

She shifts uncomfortably and Poe rolls his eyes. “Don’t feel bad,” he says, but that doesn’t stop her from feeling bad. “Besides—it means you get to have fun right now, right?”

She swallows.

That’s the point of this weekend, right? Fun?

“So long as BB isn’t going to murder you for taking me away from her,” she grins. Poe rolls his eyes. 

“As if BB and I don’t have a perfect understanding of one another. If it’s teams of three, it’s you, me, and BB. Got it?”

“Things okay with you?” she asks. 

Poe and BB had been together longer than any of them, longer even than Rey had known either of them, a quiet relationship that had withstood Poe’s job fluctuations and work travel and BB’s moments of crippling anxiety. Poe had moved down to DC a few months before Hope had been born. BB had stayed in New York.

“Yeah,” Poe shrugs. “Same as ever.”

“I meant with—”

“Beebs? She’s fine. We’re fine.” He shrugs again. He glances around the room, as if checking to see if BB was about to stumble out of the bedroom she and Poe had slept in the night before. “It’s different and takes some getting used to. We’re working through it, though.” He shrugs, seemingly unconcerned. Seemingly. Rey narrows her eyes. Poe rolls his. “Nothing gets past you, does it?”

“I just find it hard to believe that things are smooth and easy when you’re not in the same city.”

Poe sighs and leans against the doorframe of the kitchen. “She doesn’t want to be down in DC with all this MAGA shit going on, you know? I don’t fucking blame her.”

“But this’ll be temporary,” Rey says. “I mean—he’s not going to be in office forever.”

“He wasn’t supposed to be there to begin with,” Poe growls angrily. “Anyway, it’s hard to put timeframes on that. Also, I don’t know how long this gig is going to last, but I’ve always done stuff that’s brought me down to DC and relocating down there permanently might be a good idea, but…”

“But no talking about that yet.”

“Yeah,” Poe says. “It’ll be ok. I’m not worried about it. It’s hard. It’s a change. But we’ve been through other changes, so,” he shrugs. “I’m up every few weekends, and work brings me up too sometimes, so we still see each other a lot. And we’ll keep working it out. And if it’s looking to go down the drain, I’m coming back up. But we’ll keep working on it.”

Rey nods. “Yeah, you will,” she says, and Poe gives her a soft smile. He doesn’t show his heart much—or at least, not his loving heart. He shows the passion of his moral compass constantly. He’s sort of the opposite of Ben that way. 

Her hand twitches towards her phone. 

“What about you?” he asks her. “All diapers and sleepless nights?”

“Don’t forget breastfeeding,” Rey says, trying to smile. 

“She do any tricks yet?”

“Ben and I like to throw her around like a football—does that count?”

Poe chuckles. “I think as long as you’re doing cool tricks, it’s fine. Just don’t spike her. I hear that’s bad for babies.”

“Good call,” Rey says with a tired smile.

Poe glances down the hallway again, and this time, when Rey follows his gaze, she sees Paige moving towards the bathroom.

“Should we get breakfast ready?” she asks.

They cook up enough eggs to feed an army, and Poe runs down to the corner to pick up bagels as well. It takes another two hours for everyone to be up—and Rey’s not sure she can really count it as everyone being up because Dio looks as though they haven’t committed to awakeness, wrapped as they are in their hoodie. 

But Rey’s eaten and is chatting with Jannah, who she knows least well of the bunch. She’s never really known Paige’s girlfriends very well. Usually when there are big friend gatherings like this, she spends most of the time glued to Finn and BB. But BB’s sitting next to Poe, who she doesn’t live with anymore, and Finn is the center of attention where he’s usually the wallflower. 

It’s easier, sort of. Talking with an almost-stranger.

“What do you do?” Jannah asks her.

“I’m not working right now,” Rey says. “Full-time mom. I used to work in a bank, though.”

“You plan to go back?” 

Rey swallows and nods and Jannah doesn’t know her well enough to notice that her hands tighten around her fork, because that’s the question, isn’t it? The one she can’t get herself to think about in her counseling sessions with Ben, that  _ who am I, I don’t remember who I am anymore, _ and going back to who she was doesn’t feel possible anymore.

_ Why can’t you go back to work? That doesn’t make sense,  _ Ben had barked out when she’d tried to explain it, but he was already so spooked by everything. Spooked and trying to take everything on so she wouldn’t have to stumble and fall.

“Maybe,” Rey says. 

“Still got a lot on your hands,” Jannah says knowingly.

“What do you do?”

“Social work up in Boston,” Jannah says. Rey knows Jannah’s from Boston because how else would she know Paige, but she nods politely. 

“Hard stuff.”

“Yeah. Worth it though.”

“Always worth it. I wouldn’t be here without my social worker.”

“Oh?”

“I was in the foster system for most of my childhood,” Rey says and Jannah’s eyes flash with understanding. 

_ Just because things are different now doesn’t mean they won’t stabilize,  _ Ben had promised her. She’d been sitting on the floor of the shower, crying, a thing she hadn’t done since she was in Unkar Plutt’s home. God, she was so afraid that Ben was going to leave her sometimes. When had that crept into her mind? How was it that she was afraid of that after everything they’d been through? She knew he wasn’t going to leave her. That was just the lack of sleep, the hormones, the—

“All right, everyone,” Paige calls, standing up from where she’s sitting next to Jannah. “Agenda for the day. Scavenger hunt starting after brunch. The end of that will bring us to our secret activity. Then we hit karaoke until the wee hours of the morning.

“Hunt teams,” she says and Rey glances at Poe who nods at her. “Nuh-uh,” Paige says sharply.

“What?” Poe asks.

“I assigned teams.”

“You assigned teams? What happened to democracy?”

“The Russians hacked it,” Paige replies smoothly and Poe’s face crunches in a  _ too real  _ sort of wince. “You think I didn’t know you were going to grab Rey for an assured victory? Oh, no. I assigned teams.”

Poe glowers at her and Rey’s heart jumps to her throat, looking around the table. She could be teamed with Poe or BB or Dio, and Jannah seems nice, but Klaud sort of annoys her and Snap and Rey haven’t had anything to talk about in about five years. Which is why she sags with relief when Paige says she’s matched with BB.

“I wasn’t gonna fuck you all over,” Paige says rolling her eyes at them all. Snap and Poe are matched together, which has them both loudly talking about  _ crushing it _ in a way that makes Rey both smile and roll her eyes. “I just wanted to make sure we didn’t have stacked teams. Jeez.”

She hands out the pieces of paper and Rey scans the questions. 

“Everyone’s got slightly different ordered questions,” Paige continues, “and Finn and Rose have their own set to work on.”

“They’re just gonna stay here and have sex,” Klaud says loudly and Poe wolf-whistles. 

Finn glances at Rose. “It’s an option,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.

“All right, time to clear the apartment for these two lovebirds,” Jannah says.

They bundle up and take the stairs down to ground level, and Poe and Snap head east, while Klaud, Dio, and Jannah head west. 

“This has got to be the Strand, right?” BB says, turning the clue sheet around. The clue is long and wordy and talking about Rose’s legal work, but the phrase  _ we’re lucky Rose never threw the book at Finn  _ pops out.

“Yeah,” Rey says, and they walk over to Broadway and head north. 

“Sleep okay? Dio didn’t kick too much?” 

“Best night of sleep I’ve had in a while,” Rey tells her. Because it’s the truth. And especially now that she’s eaten, now that she’s put on her coat and is outside, things feel a little more focused. Her mind feels a little less sluggish. There’s something about New York in winter that Rey has always loved, but she’s never been able to put her finger on what it is. 

“They didn’t fart too much?” BB teases, clearly trying to get her to smile.

“I’m so used to bodily functions now, even if they did I probably wouldn’t have noticed.”

She switches the arm the shoulder bag with her pump is on so she can loop her arm through BB’s as they bend their head over the scavenger hunt clues.

They’re tricky. “Fucking engineers,” BB complains as they approach the Strand. “They just like to show off how smart they are.”

“You’re an engineer,” Rey laughs.

“I’m a software engineer. We’re worse, which makes actual engineers want to show off more.”

“That makes no sense,” Rey says, but BB doesn’t even bother trying to explain because they’re pushing their way into the store.

And out again four minutes later, heading west towards a dumpling shop that Rey and Finn had gone to constantly in college. 

It’s the longest that Rey has walked in she can’t remember how long. She drives mostly to get to places these days, and while she’d made an effort to get to the gym ever since she left New York, walking endlessly and taking a few yoga classes isn’t the same. She tires faster than she’d like and the straps of her bag cut into her shoulder even through the layers of her jacket.

“Can we sit for a little bit?” Rey asks BB.

“Everything okay?” BB asks, concern immediately flashing across her face.

“Yeah, I’m just tired,” she says. “Don’t have the stamina I used to.”

They find a stoop in front of a nice-looking walk-up and Rey groans the moment the bag is off her shoulder. “This fucking thing,” she grumbles.

“Do you have to use it a lot?” BB asks.

“I’ll probably need to wherever this secret activity is,” Rey says. “I don’t use it a lot at home, though. Hope’s on the boob if she’s hungry.”

“You don’t make Ben feed her?”

“He handles diapers a lot of the time if he’s home. I do one end, he does the other.” It had been a joke, something Ben had told Leia when she’d come over a few weeks after Hope had been born. It makes BB laugh.

“You okay being away from her?” BB asks. “You’ve been a bit—I don’t know…”

Rey looks at her. She’d probably get away with lying to BB just about as successfully as she’d managed with Finn yesterday. At least she doesn’t feel like she’s about to cry.

_ I don’t want to talk about it,  _ she’d told Finn at Grand Central.

She still doesn’t, really.

But she doesn’t have the excuse of not wanting to bring down BB’s bachelor weekend, or that she’s going to cry right now. So she takes a deep breath.

“Postpartum depression’s a bitch,” Rey says with the sort of brutality that Ben usually brings to the conversation, and BB makes a comforting cooing sound, her hand looping through Rey’s arm again. “Basically the only thing I feel these days is that I’m about to cry—” and there they are, the tears prickling in the corners of her eyes, the clogging of her throat, but she presses on, “—and I look at her and I get so bitter sometimes because—because—” She shudders. She can’t say it. She really can’t. “—and then I feel like I’m a terrible mother. But the second I’m gone, it feels like I’m abandoning her.”

“You’re not abandoning her. You’d never do that,” BB says.

“I just feel this constant guilt. That I’m not good enough, that I don’t know what I’m doing. And it makes me feel so small I can’t remember what it feels like to not be small anymore.”

BB’s arm tightens around her. 

“That’s what this weekend’s for,” BB says firmly. “To help remind you.”

“That’s what Ben keeps saying.”

“Is it reminding you?” BB asks.

Rey swallows. She takes a deep shuddering breath. The air is crisp and she’s sitting on a stoop in New York City with BB-8. It could be right after college, that period of time when they’d both been hot messes and she’d been on-again-off-again with a man who her friends had—rightfully—called a fascist. She’d had her heart torn in every direction—the family she’d found in those friends, Ben’s eyes buried beneath Kylo’s shitty politics, the constant question of why she was even on this earth to begin with if her parents had just left her behind in the end.

“Maybe,” she says.

“You don’t want to say no,” BB points out, and Rey gives her a wry smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

“I’m scared if I say no, I’ll ruin the whole weekend,” she says. “It’s hard to immerse myself in who I was when I have this dumb thing on my shoulder the whole time.”

“I bet,” BB hums sympathetically.

“And every time I pump, I just stare at my body and it doesn’t feel like mine. It’s not that it’s bigger than it was, it’s that it just doesn’t feel like mine. Like—fuck—my boobs are just  _ different  _ now. My nipples stick out like a mile.”

BB grins. “Practical.”

“Yeah. It’s just weird. I’ve never had much of a chest and my boobs are like right in my face all the time. Do you know what that’s like?”

The moment the words are out of her lips, she realizes what she’d said and stares at BB. 

BB bursts out laughing. “I’m gonna take this as a sign that you can’t remember me before breasts, and that’s a good thing.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rey says, pressing her hand to her face, her cheeks heating so much she could probably have fried this morning’s eggs on them.

“You literally took me bra shopping when my boobs started growing.”

“I know. I remember.” 

“But I feel you on the nipples being different and suddenly having boobs in your face.” BB’s smile goes wistful. “They’ll chill back down, I assume.”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Does Ben like playing with them?”

Rey’s throat clogs again. “Ben and I haven’t had sex since before Hope.”

This hurts her more than she wants it to. She can practically hear Ben growling  _ you had a fucking baby. You can figure out what your body wants and I don’t have a right to want to jam my dick up it.  _ “It’ll come back,” BB shrugs. “Changes and stuff. But you two can’t keep your hands off one another.” She waggles her eyebrows, clearly trying to take Rey away from close to tears. 

Rey sucks her lips between teeth, biting back a secret smile. She’d never told any of them about holding Ben’s hand for the first time—how much it had meant to both of them. That’s a private moment for the two of them. Or at least, her and Ben and Luke when he’d walked in on them.

“Yeah,” she says. She looks down at her boobs. Somewhere in Connecticut, Hope is probably crying for food and disoriented because she hates being bottle fed and where’s mom.  _ Where’s mom!  _

_ What if I let Ben touch them when I get back?  _ “How do I even offer that?” she mutters. “Hey Ben. My boobs are different. Play with them.”

“I think you say exactly that,” BB shrugs. Then, a little devious. “Ask him if he wants to taste your breastmilk fresh from the udder.”

“ _ Gross _ ,” Rey squeals, shoving BB but she’s laughing a little breathlessly and why the fuck are there tears on her face if she’s laughing? 

They’re different tears than usual, though. They feel like relief. 

The laughter reaches her eyes.

-

She and BB best the competition. They get to the bowling alley a good thirty minutes before the next team, and ten minutes before Paige shows up. 

“Trying not to stack the teams,” Rey teases her, knocking her head against the side of BB’s. 

“You’re a walking stack,” Paige grumbles. “You and Poe. I’m surprised he’s not here yet.”

“You paired him with Snap. That’s like taking off skill,” Rey replies. “Which I assume is why you did it. To cut Poe’s walking stack?” 

Paige rolls her eyes. “Yeah, but he’s gotta be on someone’s team.” She winks. Rey’s lips twitch. Paige knows. 

A brief silence follows, just enough for Rey to realize that she’s not sure how much longer they’ll be waiting and that this is the perfect time to duck away for a few minutes. “Do you mind watching our stuff if I go pump for a few minutes before everyone else gets here?” Rey asks.

“Can I watch?” BB asks at once, her eyes glinting a little bit. 

“That didn’t sound creepy at all,” Paige deadpans.

“Oh please, it’s curiosity. If I wanted to be creepy, I  _ wouldn’t _ ask.” Rey gives BB a sharp look and BB winks at her. 

“It’s not that exciting,” Rey tells her.

“Still.”

Which is how she ends up in the large stall with BB, not thinking about her body while also actively talking about her boobs and breast milk. “You can freeze it,” she says. “So I froze a bunch this past week for Ben.”

“You don’t use formula?”

“We haven’t needed to. I guess we could. Like if Ben runs out or something.”

“When does she start eating people food?”

In front of BB’s inquisitive eyes, the questions about Hope don’t feel smothering. They don’t feel like the only thing that matters is the baby. It makes Rey feel like a person again. 

“Soon, we hope. She’s getting curious about it for sure.”

“She a curious lass?”

Rey smiles and tilts her head back against the bathroom wall. “Yes,” Rey says. “She’s curious and puts everything in her mouth.”

“Best way to determine what it is,” BB replies. “My mouth has never failed me.”

By the time they’re out, Poe and Snap have arrived, and fifteen minutes later, Finn, Rose, Dio, Jannah, and Klaud are there as well. They split across three lanes, and Paige orders several pitchers of beer and wings and fries, and Rey stuffs her face while she waits for her turn.

“Come on, Jackson, show us what you got!” she shouts at Finn as he lines up in the alley. His bowls a spare, which he blames on her catcalling, and spends most of her turn calling, “All right, Solo, if that is your real name.” 

It’s weird having Finn call her Solo.

_ Johnson _ is the one who’d made strikes constantly when they’d bowled here in their early twenties.

_ Solo _ is the one who moved to Connecticut and who is in counseling with her husband and who feels guilty every which way about her daughter.

But Solo’s the one hitting a strike on her first shot and turning around, arms in the air. “Still got it, baby!” she says, strutting back towards the seat in her blue bowling shoes and throwing herself down next to Finn. 

“You bowl a lot up in the burbs?” Rose asks her as Dio goes up for their turn.

“Nah. Ben doesn’t like bowling much. You’re my bowl squad,” Rey says. “I’m just really good at what I do.” She winks at Finn.

Finn’s face is shining with happiness and there’s something in the way he’s looking at her.  _ You’re okay,  _ his eyes say to her.

And yeah—yeah, she feels okay. Maybe. For a few minutes. She’s laughing, and bowling strikes, and she feels less dazed. It’s been a good day. 

_ And back to reality tomorrow. _

_ Go away,  _ she tells her depression.  _ Let me have today. And I’m not letting you have tomorrow. _

She knows it doesn’t work that way, but it feels right to say. It feels really good to feel it.

That feels like Rey. Johnson or Solo.

And Rey’s ready for some fucking karaoke.

By the time they make it to the karaoke bar, she’s more than a little tipsy, more than a little loud. “Who goes first? You go first? I go first?” Poe asks as they jostle their way towards the table that Paige had reserved for them.

“We’re going first,” Rey says, grabbing BB’s arm and tugging her towards the stage. 

“What are we singing?” BB asks her, grinning broadly. The last time she’d sung with BB was in that movie theater in Stamford, when all food had made her feel like vomiting but somehow popcorn was ok. Because of course they were going to sing along to  _ Rocketman _ .

“Elton?” she says, handing one of the mics to BB.

“Kiki,” BB grins back, and they select the song. 

Neither is a singer, but that doesn’t matter the moment that BB opens her mouth and starts singing, “Don’t go breaking my heart.”

“I couldn’t if I tried,” Rey sings right back. Karaoke isn’t about sounding good, it’s about throwing her arm around BB’s shoulder and enjoying the way the lights on the stage warm her skin. She’d bowled a very high score—not her highest, but higher than anyone else’s, and she’s had more beer than she’s had in months, and she’s got BB at her side and Finn beaming up at her from the table. Her breasts aren’t sore at the moment, and her ears aren’t waiting for a despairing cry of  _ why aren’t you here?  _ because she’ll be back home tomorrow.

She feels like she’s back home right now.

“When I was down, I was your clown,” she and BB sing together, and she is giggling now, laughing, whooping almost as she sings.

The bar cheers when she and BB hop down from the stage and Poe and Finn both give them standing ovations.

“Your turn,” BB says to Poe who makes his way towards the stage, and a moment later it’s the background track to “Thriller” playing up on the speaker system.

“What are you planning?” Rey asks Finn.

“Can’t decide,” he says. 

“You’ve got to serenade her properly,” Rey slurs at him. “She loves you and you love her. And this is about love.”

“How drunk are you?”

“‘M not.” She is. Drunker than she’s been in ages. Usually she matches Ben’s intake, and Ben doesn’t let himself drink too much in case he starts crying or fighting. But there’s no Ben here, and these are the people she’d spent her early twenties getting shitfaced with, even if none of them drinks quite as much as they did now. 

“You are,” he grins. 

“I miss you,” she tells him. 

“I miss you too,” he replies.

“I miss feeling like this,” she tells him, but she doesn’t think he hears, because Rose has grabbed his hand and is pulling him to the front of the bar because they’re going to sing  _ something _ together after Poe’s done.

She watches him go, watches the way he leans against Rose, pulls her into his arms and holds her to his chest the way that Ben sometimes does with Rey.

Her phone is heavy in her pocket all of a sudden. She wants to text Ben. She’s drunk and wants his arms around her, his lips at her neck. But she’s also not supposed to be texting him. He won’t reply because he’s a stubborn asshole who probably won’t recognize the difference between needing him and  _ needing _ him.

_ I’ll see you tomorrow,  _ she thinks to her phone.  _ You and Hope.  _

And it doesn’t feel like a weight, somehow, the memory of her baby in her arms. It’s certainly no more of a weight than the fucking pump case she’s been dragging around all weekend. 

She takes another sip of beer and applauds with the rest when Poe comes back down off the stage, and Finn and Rose take the stage to sing “A Whole New World.”

They look good together. They’re certainly better singers than she and BB had been, but maybe a little less of a stage presence than Poe. Rey whoops at all the parts that have a double entendre and compares notes with Dio about the time that they performed “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” together at Rey’s bachelorette party.

By the time Rey is getting up to sing by herself again, the world around her is blurry and her vision is short-circuiting a bit, but in that blurry short-circuiting, she feels unbridled joy for the first time in months.

-

Rey is not the first person awake on Sunday morning. 

In fact, she’s the last person awake. She hadn’t stirred when Dio had gotten out of the bed they were sharing. Her breasts hurt like a motherfucker and she goes to pump them, remembering BB’s curiosity as she presses them to her nipples. She pees, she takes some deep breaths.

She has a headache, which doesn’t surprise her much. She hasn’t browned out in ages, even if she hadn’t drunk nearly as much as she once had. None of them did. Hell, Poe had cut himself off by four, and Snap had had less beer than she remembers him ever consuming at any event they’d ever been to.

“Morning,” Finn says, as she sits at the end of the table, reaches for a bagel they hadn’t gotten to yesterday morning, puts as much cream cheese as she can onto it, and stuffs it into her mouth.

“Morning,” she rasps at him. Her throat hurts. She hadn’t vomited last night, had she? That’s just from shout-singing too much into a microphone, right? She’s not getting sick, and is going to pass on a cold to Hope when she gets home, is she?

She glances at her phone.

She hasn’t wanted to look at it since about this time yesterday. There are no new messages—the only people who would message her are here, or in Connecticut determinedly not messaging her until she’s on the train.

It’s nearly noon.

She glances around the table. Klaud’s gone already, as is Snap. Poe’s dressed and showered and is putting stuff in his bag. Dio’s on the couch, probably texting their guild, and BB and Rose are looking at some video that’s making them both giggle. Jannah’s in the kitchen with Paige, cleaning up, and it’s nearly noon.

Rey takes a deep breath and turns back to her phone. She pulls up the Metro North app and clicks through to the train schedule.

“Any sense of when you’re heading back?” Finn asks her quietly. He’s watching her closely again, and Rey feels this strange compression in her chest. She doesn’t want to go. The headache is the worst of her feelings today.

But also—she has to get back. She has a kid, and Ben, and—

And herself. She has herself to take care of too.  _ I’m not letting you have tomorrow.  _ She’d been so defiant about it—angry. Not defeated. Her head can’t defeat her if it’s part of her and she won’t let it. That little flame inside her—it had burned low, but it’s not out. She doesn’t want to go, but she feels like she can face it, doesn’t feel as though she’s being dragged kicking and screaming.

“The expresses run once an hour,” she says. “I should probably be back by three or four so Ben has time to prep for work tomorrow.”

Finn nods. “Want to walk up to Grand Central? Just you and me?”

Rey gives him a smile that reaches her eyes. “Only if you carry my pump.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She finishes eating, dresses, gives BB the longest hug (“I’ll come up and visit,” her friend promises, and Rey knows she will), gives Rose a kiss on the cheek, gives Poe a smile, and then she and Finn are off, walking lazily uptown through the cold.

“You seem a bit better,” he says carefully.

“It’s been a good weekend,” Rey replies. “Ben was right. I needed this.”

“You gonna be okay?”

Rey shrugs. “I don’t know what okay means. But I don’t think it’s gonna be the same as it was.” Finn nods, and she knows what he’s going to say before he says it because they’re like that. They’ve always been like that. “The brain chemistry stuff’ll be the same, but I don’t feel—I—I think I’ve got a better handle on myself, which I needed.”

“Yeah?” Finn asks.

“Yeah,” she says. “I stopped remembering who I was. How the fuck can I be a good parent to her if I don’t remember who I am? And I got some flashes of that this weekend, so I have some ideas.”

That last bit’s not quite the truth, but it doesn’t feel like a lie either. She’ll have ideas soon. Because that’s what she does—figures things out. Makes things better. Faces demons defiantly, even her own when she recognizes what they are. 

“I—realizing I can leave her for a few days and it’ll be okay is a good thing. It means I can leave her for a few hours—give her to Ben, or Leia, or hire a fucking baby sitter. I can do stuff for me. I don’t have to only be her mom.”

“Is that how things were feeling?” Finn asks slowly.

Rey nods. She takes a slow breath. “I don’t know how to be a mom. I don’t have a model. I just know what I don’t want to be, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other things I don’t want to be. Like, I don’t want to be someone who’s a shell of who she is because she gives everything to her kid. What example will I be setting for her if I do that? Especially when I’ve fought so hard to be who I am.”

And suddenly Finn’s arms are around her, pulling her close. “You’ve got so much you can teach her,” he tells her firmly and she presses her face into his shoulder, squeezing her eyes shut. It’s cold and there are flakes of snow floating in the air, as if unable to decide if they want to actually land. “And you fucking call me if you forget that, okay?”

Rey nods. 

“Me and BB, we’ll be up in a second. We didn’t exit stage left because you had a kid or because you’re not in the city anymore. Hell, I might not be in the city much longer.”

“Yeah?” Rey asks. They pull away. She can’t imagine Finn not in New York, but then again, she hadn’t been able to fathom herself not in New York either, but here she is. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Rose wants to be closer to Paige, and I think Paige is gonna be in Boston for a while.”

“You know what’s halfway between Massachusetts and New York?” Rey asks slowly.

“We’re not moving to fucking Connecticut,” Finn growls and Rey laughs.  _ Of all the dumb, useless states you could move to,  _ he’d complained. It feels like a lifetime ago.

It was a lifetime ago—it was before Hope’s lifetime.

“She can come to your wedding, right?”

Finn looks at her sharply. “Your kid? My godchild? At my wedding? Never.”

She smiles. “I just meant—it won’t be distracting or—”

“This is the dumbest fucking question in the history of dumb fucking questions, which do exist. Of  _ course _ you can bring her to the wedding. Unless you don’t want her there and need a break. If she’s crying and pooping through vows, that’ll be an honor and a delight.”

She rests her head on Finn’s shoulder and he rests his cheek against her. 

“You excited?” she asks him. 

“To get married?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess,” he says. “It’s not gonna change our relationship as much as leaving New York will, you know? Like, it’s not gonna be like magically things are not what they’ve been for the past few years. I love her, and I’m gonna stay with her. And hell yeah am I looking forward to a party where everyone talks about how much they love me, her, and us together. And you better bring your a-game to that best person’s speech because you’ve got big shoes to fill.”

“You think I can’t write a better speech than you?”

“I’m just saying—mine was really good. I set a gold fucking standard.”

“Okay, okay.”

God, it feels good to laugh. To feel light again. And she knows—she knows—brain chemistry means this is ephemeral. But to just remember what it’s like for a few minutes, a few hours—she feels herself walking faster, standing straighter. She can’t wait to see her baby again, to share this smile and laughter with her while she can. 

They reach Grand Central fifteen minutes before her train and grab cupcakes before Finn gives her the biggest hug of the weekend. 

“BB and me—we’ll come up soon,” he promises. 

“Yeah?”

“Yep.”

“Even if it means braving Ben?”

“As if I haven’t been texting him all weekend with babysitting updates,” Finn snorts and Rey stiffens.

“What?”

“You got off the train crying, Rey. I wasn’t gonna not keep him up to date in case you had a full fucking meltdown. Me and BB have been babysitting you. And don’t you get infuckingdignant. How many times have you babysat us? It’s what friends are for.”

Rey’s throat clogs again and her eyes go bright. Her heart does this weird floppy thing in her chest, like a cat that’s decided to roll onto its back in the sunshine and let the light warm it up. She feels safe and loved and cared for and—

“Thanks,” she chokes out. “It’s—it—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Finn says and he’s hugging her again. 

“I was trying really hard to—”

“Look, the weekend wasn’t about you, and it was fun regardless of where your head’s been. But if you think we’re not gonna have a good time and  _ also _ do our best to make sure you are too, your head’s more twisted than I thought. We ain’t gonna have a good time if you’re not having a good time.”

“I had a good time,” she tells him. “I did.”

“Good. You deserve it. Now get on your train and go back to your husband who’s  _ really _ had quite the weekend with your infant. And we’ll see you soon.”

“See you soon.”

And she makes her way down into the tunnels under Grand Central, her shoulders squared, her heart a bit of a mess, but a good mess she thinks. A happy mess. Not a bad mess, at the very least.

She leans her head against the train window and pulls up her phone. She doesn’t have service, and won’t until the train gets above ground in Harlem. But she scrolls through pictures she’d taken that weekend—Finn and Rose singing duets together, Poe trying to bowl backwards, Jannah kissing Paige’s cheek.

When the sunlight streams through the window, she calls Ben.

“Hi, I’m on the train,” she tells him.

“You had a good time?” 

“Yeah,” she says, smiling. “Yeah, it was good.”

“Good,” he sounds relieved. 

“You had Finn and BB babysit me?”

There’s a pause, and she knows that Ben had  _ not _ expected to get outed on that front. He lets out an annoyed huff.

“Finn offered, I wasn’t going to turn him down.”

Rey chuckles and Ben doesn’t respond for a moment.

“You just laughed,” he says quietly.

“Yeah,” she says, blinking back annoying ever-present tears. “I did.”

She hears his breath shaking a little bit on the other end of the line. “Ben?”

“I’m glad you had a good weekend,” he says. 

“Did Hope miss me?”

“She literally did not stop crying. I think she took it as base betrayal that I’d even  _ try _ to feed her.”

“But she ate?”

“Yes. She ate. In protest. And pooped a lot.”

“Little poop monster.”

“Little poop monster,” Ben agrees.

“BB tried to make me feel bad for not letting you play with my boobs now that they’re different.”

She hears Ben’s breath hitch slightly. “And what did you tell BB?”

“That she might have a point.”

“She’s smart, that BB-8.”

“Yeah. Very wise.”

It’s not long before the train is pulling into her stop and Rey gets up, slinging the bag with her pump up over her shoulder. She spies Ben on the platform, Hope strapped to his chest. He’s pressing his face against her little knit hat, and her face is red and exhausted looking, like she’s about to hit the sleep part of crying herself to sleep.

“Is that my girl?” Rey asks, setting the bag down on the train platform and taking Hope out of her Baby Bjorn. She’s so warm in her arms and Rey presses a kiss to the top of her head as Hope hiccups confusedly.  _ Where have you been? _ she seems to demand in her weird baby language. “I’m back. I’ll always come back, sweetheart. I promise.” She has one arm under Hope’s rump and her other hand holding her head as she looks up at Ben.

“Hi,” he whispers to her, bending to brush his lips against hers.

“Hi,” she replies. “Good brain day,” she tells him.

“I can see that,” he replies. His eyes are more than a little bright. “Let’s get you some more of those.”

She swallows and presses her lips to his again, then to the side of Hope’s head. He bends down and takes the bag with her pump and together, they head off the platform and back to the car. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed <3 you can find me [here](http://linktr.ee/crossingwinter)!


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